Darwin never saw it. I can never remember its name. It had to exist because the orchid existed: Angraecum sesquipedale, loveliest of the white night-blooming orchids of Madagascar, its trailing nectary thin as a knitting needle. In those years I kept orchids as lonelier women keep cats, but I never told you that story, or…
In Transit There are times out of mind, times spent alone in a strange place waiting, times when the mind is alive and the body almost ruined, when you hallucinate on the real, and see it in the context of its meaning. These are the airplanes and buses of student fiction. Your thoughts quicken when…
This conversation took place in Philip Levine's home near the Tufts University campus where he teaches each autumn. During the winter and summer months, he and his wife Frances live in Fresno, California, although in the winter of 1985 Philip Levine will be a visiting professor at Brown University. Levine's Selected Poems was published in…
Water angels, I wrongly thought them, orotund in blue tinseled light. And water is right, the reedy stems taint at first frost with the bronze of monumental fountains. But the factual angel is a vessel or basin, the antique catchment, the Cytherean scallop shell that bore the halts and plunges of its fleshly passenger across…
November 9, 1981 Late Monday afternoon It is not yet 5 p.m. now and already near to completely dark, just the sky is still that deep dark blue just before it becomes black. Much to write about, though I have been avoiding sitting down here. What first? The good news or the bad? Last Tuesday…
A solitary apartment house, the last one before the boulevard ends and a bricked road winds its slow way out of town. On the third floor through the dusty windows Karen beholds the elegant couples walking arm in arm in the public park. It is Saturday afternoon, and she is waiting for a particular young…
The yarn pulled diagonally over neighboring threads in time might equal the sheen on a bird's feather, a flower petal's tip, or some corner of sky. As far back as I remember, she was never without some neutral canvas, rectangle, circle, square, her hands having chosen the continental, basket-weave, or half-stitch. I watched to see…
A group of us were sitting around trying to think of nice things to say about my grandfather. He had died at ten o'clock that morning. So there we all were, gathered in my parents' living room. There was my mother, of course, She was Grandpa Jack's eldest child. And my father. And my mother's…
Before I could tell time, I'd sit and wait For the cuckoo in my mother's wooden clock To open his red door, and sing “cuckoo.” I never knew how many times he'd sing, But the song was regular, and a long trill Gave me a chance to look inside his house Where it was dark…
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